bijnis, a business-to-business platform for factories, has raised $30M in a Series B financing round. The round has been led by Westbridge Capital, with participation from existing investors InfoEdge, Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital, and Waterbridge Ventures.
bijnis, founded in 2015 by Siddharth Vij, Chaitanya Rathi, Siddharth Rastogi, and Shubham Agarwal, is on a mission to empower & uplift the community of Indian manufacturers and take them to the world. The founding team hails from a deep manufacturing background and have successfully leveraged their past experiences to solve the factory’s demand generation needs and operating inefficiencies.
bijnis operates in the $100B+ largely unorganized categories of fashion, footwear & lifestyle. Over 5,000+ manufacturers are currently running their business on the ‘bijnis factory app’. The bijnis factory app builds digital factory profiles that enables small, medium and large manufacturers to expand their businesses. It gives them direct access to the retailers and enables them to build their own distribution channels. bijnis connects these manufacturers with over 1 lac retailers on their platform.
The investment will primarily be utilized towards expanding the base of manufacturers and helping them grow their factories via expanding retailer base on the platform. Additionally, this infusion of capital will be used for building out technology and products focused on increasing the production efficiency of the factories.
Siddharth Vij, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder said, “bijnis’ vision is to take factories to the world by digitizing and building a globally integrated network of manufacturers on one platform. The manufacturers in the value chain have always been dependent on the middlemen/agents in many ways. bijnis is pioneering the transformation of the manufacturing landscape in India by providing access to tech-based solutions. Our simple and scalable operating systems help the manufacturers to improve overall efficiency as they run capacities at optimum level, have efficient raw material sourcing & capital capabilities. We feel privileged and excited to have Westbridge Capital on our journey of achieving bijnis’ vision of taking factories to the world. At the same time, we are grateful to all our investors for the faith they have shown in our mission and the ability to execute towards it.”
Sandeep Singhal, Partner, Westbridge Capital said, “We are excited to partner with the bijnis team on their mission to create value for manufacturers by connecting them directly with retailers & helping them improve their operations and sourcing. The founding team has very strong category understanding given their family background in manufacturing and that has enabled them to build a compelling proposition for manufacturers and retailers in the fashion & lifestyle categories. bijnis has carved a niche for itself as the B2B platform of choice in these categories and we are excited to be partners as they transform the ecosystem for these categories in India.”
Kitty Agarwal, Partner, Info Edge Ventures said, “bijnis’ factory-first approach in the fashion, footwear and lifestyle space has been a game changer in building strong dependency of 5k+ Indian factories on its platform. Not only are these factories getting direct pan India retailer distribution with detailed visibility of buying behavior but also digitizing their operations and sourcing raw materials more efficiently. Razor sharp customer focus and innovation has led to bijnis emerging as a category leader and desired partner to do business with both factories and retailers. We are fortunate to be close partners with the bijnis team since their seed round in 2018 and have continued to double down in every round because of our deep faith in the founders and their passion for truly changing how Indian factories do business with the world.”
Shraeyansh Thakur, Vice President, Sequoia India said, “Traditional supply chains in lifestyle categories in India continue to be extremely unorganised and fragmented. Small and medium manufacturers are the backbone of these supply chains, representing a significant part of India’s manufacturing economy, which is at the brink of massive transformation driven by rapid digitisation across layers. The team is very excited about bijnis’s vision of building an operating system for manufacturing in this segment and look forward to partnering them on this mission.”
Ashish Jain, Partner, WaterBridge Ventures said “Bijnis represents quintessential Tech disruption in the large and fragmented Indian B2B commerce space. With a founding team that relates to the pain points of Indian factories as well as MSME retailers better than most, Bijnis is on track to create a scaled up game changing company.”
Sudipto Sannigrahi, Vice President, Matrix India commented, “We are great believers of bijnis’ factory-first approach to help fashion and footwear manufacturers grow their business exponentially and discover efficiencies in their supply chains. The last 12 months have been transformational for bijnis, and the scale of growth achieved is a clear outcome of the focused investments in the factory product as well as the retailer reach. We’re excited to double down on our partnership with the bijnis team and look forward to the journey ahead!”
Source: Business World
